Helen and Colin Walking Blog: Cuban Reservoir to Soller

Cuban Reservoir to Soller

Today we had to get the 9am bus from Port de Soller which would take us up to Cuban reservoir. Anyone planning to do this walk be ready for a mass push for the bus door. You will find no queue or what queue was there is no longer. It seems the Germans like pushing in and unfortunately not everyone there managed to get on the bus due to lack of space.

The journey up the main road is about 35 mins and winds it way around the mountain side. Sometime you be looking out of the window down sheer drops as the bus swings in way round the bends. The bus stops at a large lay bay and nearly ¾ of the bus gets off. At this point I realise I forgot my water bottle. It’s a nice hot day and no shops or bars at the stop.

You have a choice of two ways round the reservoir. The right side is shorter then the left. We choose the left as we are going to leave the path and head up onto the ridge and do a couple of tops. So we head down a good service track road until we come to the dam where we turn left and leave everyone else to head down. We head up a stoney path to a small coll where we have great views to a valley.. Pity the other walkers don’t even come up to have a look at what’s on the other side. We follow the path but without the book we could easily miss the turning that we want. The markings are faint. We are now following cairns up the mountain which is not easy in the sun. As they light grey they just blend in and plus they are small cairns. Few times we did go wrong or the cairns stopped and we had to back track. Once we get further on we turn and look back at some great views and other paths we can see on the far hills. Another walk for another day.

The book says look out for a donkey trail path which we find and this is easy to follow as it zigzags up the mountain. Nearing the top the paths stops and we back onto cairns which are all over the place. So we know where the ridge should be so we make a line for that. Soon we are on the top and looking down onto the reservoir and the path that every one took. Think it took us about hour half to get to the top. All round is good views. You can see the RAF post across the way and the other way is the ridge we are going to do. We check the map to see which point we will come of the ridge as we still got long way to get down. The main path that everybody took is about 3 to 4 hours and we are about 2 hours to add on to that.

After lunch on top we carry long the ridge and do another two tops. One is a small scramble up the rocks. If the cloud is down you would need to be careful following the route as sometime there was not a path on the ground.. After our final summit we take the path down and start to meet loads of people coming off the other summit which we did not want to do. Seems everybody does that one. So we now rejoined the main path from the reservoir and its starts as a good forest track which keeps us cool. We come across very large boulder on the path which at some point must have rolled in from some where. As the paths heads down it then changes to a stone path. Small stones set like cobbles. This zig zags all the way down to the valey floor and we are about 2 hours from the bottom. All round you can see the olive terraces that must have been built 100 of years ago. Now look not in use. But amazing how they are built. We passed a few people on the way and a few are also heading up. Its very hot as well now and we are down to the last drop of water, but further down we came to a cross a tap with big metal mug on a chain. So we took the chance of drinking the water and it was nice and cold.

We arrive in the village of Binarar where we have a cold beer before moving on to Soller where we have a Orange Soller ice cream. Fresh orange in a glass with orange ice cream and cream. Very refreshing. We then get a taxi back to Port de Soller for 8 euros.